During this time he worked as a ghostwriter for astrologer Carroll Righter. Soon the rest of the Mitchum family joined them in Long Beach. Mitchum arrived in Long Beach, California, in 1936, staying again with his sister Julie. He soon went back on the road, eventually riding the rails to California. It was during this time, while recovering from injuries that nearly lost him a leg, that he met the woman he would marry, a teenaged Dorothy Spence. By Mitchum’s own account, he escaped and returned to his family in Delaware. He experienced numerous adventures during his years as one of the Depression era’s “wild boys of the road.” At age 14 in Savannah, Georgia, he was arrested for vagrancy and put on a local chain gang. After being expelled from Haaran High School, he left his sister and traveled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including as a ditch-digger for the Civilian Conservation Corps and as a professional boxer. A year later, in 1930, he moved in with his older sister, in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. When he was 12, his mother sent Mitchum to live with his grandparents in Felton, Delaware, where he was promptly expelled from his middle school for scuffling with a principal.

Throughout Mitchum’s childhood, he was known as a prankster, often involved in fistfights and mischief. When all of the children were old enough to attend school, Ann found employment as a linotype operator for the Bridgeport Post. In September 1919 a second son, John, was born. She returned to her family in Connecticut, and married a former British Army major who helped her care for the children. After his death, Ann Mitchum was awarded a government pension, and soon realized she was pregnant. James Mitchum was crushed to death in a railyard accident in Charleston, South Carolina in February 1919, when his son was less than 2 years old. His mother, Ann Harriet, was a Norwegian immigrant and sea captain’s daughter, and his father, James Thomas Mitchum, was a shipyard and railroad worker. Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut into a Methodist family. Mitchum is largely remembered for his starring roles in several major works of the film noir style, and is considered a forerunner of the anti-heroes prevalent in film during the 1950s and 1960s.

Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American film actor, author, composer and singer.

Robert Mitchum by Lee Server